Faster please – Bill would require full transparency in health care pricing | Western Colorado | gjsentinel.com

Instead, his idea is to force providers and insurance companies to publicly post what they plan to charge for any procedure or medical service before anyone pays anything, just like a grocery store or gas station. Doing so would force providers and insurers to establish more reasonable prices because everyone would know what each is charging.

“This is not another nod to the concept of consumerism or patients being able to shop around for services. We don’t need that,” Silverstein said. “Ninety-five percent of this is about changing the behavior of a marketplace. Markets do not really work on consumers shopping around. They really work on competitors being able to see each other’s prices.”

His nonprofit group has several proposed measures for this fall’s ballot calling on those providers to reveal their pricing, physicians to disclose what insurance plans they accept, and make those insurance companies show their members how hospital payments and patient reimbursement rates are calculated.

Silverstein said doing so is the best way to control the spiraling cost of health care coverage nationwide without having to impose caps on medical pricing.

“Patients just want to be able to trust the system,” he said. “No law in the country has ever even contemplated requiring transparency for the health insurance carriers. It’s always been about the providers. You can’t get to a transparent, functional system without imposing real transparency on the negotiated contract of health insurance carriers.”

There was a recently passed pricing transparency bill but it only applied to non-insurance (direct pay) pricing, which is a very small percentage of the population. This would be a much larger step.